Theory

Reactionary epochs like ours not only disintegrate and weaken the
working class and isolate its vanguard but also lower the general
ideological level of the movement and throw political thinking back to
stages long since passed through. In these conditions the task of the
vanguard is, above all, not to let itself be carried along by the
backward flow: it must swim against the current. If an unfavourable
relation of forces prevents it from holding political positions it has
won, it must at least retain its ideological positions, because in them
is expressed the dearly paid experience of the past. Fools will consider
this policy ’sectarian’. Actually it is the only means of preparing for
a new tremendous surge forward with the coming historical tide.

Stalinism and Bolshevismby Leon Trotsky

The Reaction Against Marxism and Bolshevism

Great political defeats provoke a reconsideration of values, generally
occurring in two directions. On the one hand the true vanguard, enriched
by the experience of defeat, defends with tooth and nail the heritage of
revolutionary thought and on this basis strives to educate new cadres
for the mass struggle to come. On the other hand the routinists,
centrists and dilettantes, frightened by defeat, do their best to
destroy the authority of the revolutionary tradition and go backwards in
their search for a ’New World’.

One could indicate a great many examples of ideological reaction, most
often taking the form of prostration. All the literature if the Second
and Third Internationals, as well as of their satellites of the London
Bureau, consists essentially of such examples. Not a suggestion of
Marxist analysis. Not a single serious attempt to explain the causes of
defeat, About the future, not one fresh word. Nothing but cliches,
conformity, lies and above all solicitude for their own bureaucratic
self-preservation. It is enough to smell 10 words from some Hilferding
or Otto Bauer to know this rottenness. The theoreticians of the
Comintern are not even worth mentioning. The famous Dimitrov is as
ignorant and commonplace as a shopkeeper over a mug of beer. The minds
of these people are too lazy to renounce Marxism: they prostitute it.
But it is not they that interest us now. Let us turn to the ’innovators’.

The former Austrian communist, Willi Schlamm, has devoted a small book
to the Moscow trials, under the expressive title, The Dictatorship of
the Lie. Schlamm is a gifted journalist, chiefly interested in current
affairs. His criticism of the Moscow frame-up, and his exposure of the
psychological mechanism of the ’voluntary confessions’, are excellent.
However, he does not confine himself to this: he wants to create a new
theory of socialism that would insure us against defeats and frame-ups
in the future. But since Schlamm is by no means a theoretician and is
apparently not well acquainted with the history of the development of
socialism, he returns entirely to pre-Marxist socialism, and notably to
its German, that is to its most backward, sentimental and mawkish
variety. Schlamm denounces dialectics and the class struggle, not to
mention the dictatorship of the proletariat. The problem of transforming
society is reduced for him to the realisation of certain ’eternal’ moral
truths with which he would imbue mankind, even under capitalism. Willi
Schlamm’s attempts to save socialism by the insertion of the moral gland
is greeted with joy and pride in Kerensky’s review, Novaya Rossia (an
old provincial Russian review now published in Paris); as the editors
justifiably conclude, Schlamm has arrived at the principles of true
Russian socialism, which a long time ago opposed the holy precepts of
faith, hope and charity to the austerity and harshness of the class
struggle. The ’novel’ doctrine of the Russian ’Social Revolutionaries’
represents, in its ’theoretical ’premises, only a return to the
pre-March (1848!) Germany. However, it would be unfair to demand a more
intimate knowledge of the history of ideas from Kerensky than from
Schlamm. Far more important is the fact that Kerensky, who is in
solidarity with Schlamm, was, while head of the government, the
instigator of persecutions against the Bolsheviks as agents of the
German general staff: organised, that is, the same frame-ups against
which Schlamm now mobilises his moth-eaten metaphysical absolutes.

The psychological mechanism of the ideological reaction of Schlamm and
his like, is not at all complicated. For a while these people took part
in a political movement that swore by the class struggle and appeared,
in word if not in thought, to dialectical materialism. In both Austria
and Germany the affair ended in a catastrophe. Schlamm draws the
wholesale conclusion: this is the result of dialectics and the class
struggle! And since the choice of revelations is limited by historical
experience and... by personal knowledge, our reformer in his search for
the word falls on a bundle of old rags which he valiantly opposes not
only to Bolshevism but to Marxism as well.

At first glance Schlamm’s brand of ideological reaction seems too
primitive (from Marx... to Kerensky!) to pause over. But actually it is
very instructive: precisely in its primitiveness it represents the
common denominator of all other forms of reaction, particularly of those
expressed by wholesale denunciation of Bolshevism.

’Back to Marxism’?

Marxism found its highest historical expression in Bolshevism. Under the
banner of Bolshevism the first victory of the proletariat was achieved
and the first workers’ state established. No force can now erase these
facts from history. But since the October Revolution has led to the
present stage of the triumph of the bureaucracy, with its system of
repression, plunder and falsification - the ’dictatorship of the lie’,
to use Schlamm’s happy expression - many formalistic and superficial
minds jump to a summary conclusion: one cannot struggle against
Stalinism without renouncing Bolshevism. Schlamm, as we already know,
goes further: Bolshevism, which degenerated into Stalinism, itself grew
out of Marxism; consequently one cannot fight Stalinism while remaining
on the foundation of Marxism. There are others, less consistent but more
numerous, who say on the contrary: ’We must return Bolshevism to
Marxism.’ How? To what Marxism? Before Marxism became ’bankrupt’ in the
form of Bolshevism it has already broken down in the form of social
democracy, Does the slogan ’Back to Marxism’ then mean a leap over the
periods of the Second and Third Internationals... to the First
International? But it too broke down in its time. Thus in the last
analysis it is a question of returning to the collected works of Marx
and Engels. One can accomplish this historic leap without leaving one’s
study and even without taking off one’s slippers. But how are we going
to go from our classics (Marx died in 1883, Engels in 1895) to the tasks
of a new epoch, omitting several decades of theoretical and political
struggles, among them Bolshevism and the October revolution? None of
those who propose to renounce Bolshevism as an historically bankrupt
tendency has indicated any other course. So the question is reduced to
the simple advice to study Capital. We can hardly object. But the
Bolsheviks, too, studied Capital and not badly either. This did not
however prevent the degeneration of the Soviet state and the staging of
the Moscow trials. So what is to be done?

Is Bolshevism Responsible for Stalinism?

Is it true that Stalinism represents the legitimate product of
Bolshevism, as all reactionaries maintain, as Stalin himself avows, as
the Mensheviks, the anarchists, and certain left doctrinaires
considering themselves Marxist believe? ’We have always predicted this’
they say, ’Having started with the prohibition of other socialist
parties, the repression of the anarchists, and the setting up of the
Bolshevik dictatorship in the Soviets, the October Revolution could only
end in the dictatorship of the bureaucracy. Stalin is the continuation
and also the bankruptcy of Leninism.’

The flaw in this reasoning begins in the tacit identification of
Bolshevism, October Revolution and Soviet Union. The historical process
of the struggle of hostile forces is replaced by the evolution of
Bolshevism in a vacuum. Bolshevism, however, is only a political
tendency closely fused with the working class but not identical with it.
And aside from the working class there exist in the Soviet Union a
hundred million peasants, diverse nationalities, and a heritage of
oppression, misery and ignorance. The state built up by the Bolsheviks
reflects not only the thought and will of Bolshevism but also the
cultural level of the country, the social composition of the population,
the pressure of a barbaric past and no less barbaric world imperialism.
To represent the process of degeneration of the Soviet state as the
evolution of pure Bolshevism is to ignore social reality in the name of
only one of its elements, isolated by pure logic. One has only to call
this elementary mistake by its true name to do away with every trace of
it.

Bolshevism, in any case, never identified itself either with the October
Revolution or with the Soviet state that issued from it. Bolshevism
considered itself as one of the factors of history, its ’Conscious’
factor - a very important but not decisive one. We never sinned on
historical subjectivism. We saw the decisive factor - on the existing
basis of productive forces - in the class struggle, not only on a
national scale but on an international scale.

When the Bolsheviks made concessions to the peasant tendency, to private
ownership, set up strict rules for membership of the party, purged the
party of alien elements, prohibited other parties, introduced the NEP,
granted enterprises as concessions, or concluded diplomatic agreements
with imperialist governments, they were drawing partial conclusions from
the basic fact that had been theoretically clear to them from the
beginning; that the conquest of power, however important it may be in
itself, by no means transforms the party into a sovereign ruler of the
historical process. Having taken over the state, the party is able,
certainly, to influence the development of society with a power
inaccessible to it before; but in return it submits itself to a 10 times
greater influence from all other elements in society. It can, by the
direct attack by hostile forces, be thrown out of power. Given a more
drawn out tempo of development, it can degenerate internally while
holding on to power. It is precisely this dialectic of the historical
process that is not understood by those sectarian logicians who try to
find in the decay of the Stalinist bureaucracy a crushing argument
against Bolshevism.

In essence these gentlemen say: the revolutionary party that contains in
itself no guarantee against its own degeneration is bad. By such a
criterion Bolshevism is naturally condemned: it has no talisman. But the
criterion itself is wrong. Scientific thinking demands a concrete
analysis: how and why did the party degenerate? No one but the
Bolsheviks themselves have, up to the present time, given such an
analysis,. To do this they had no need to break with Bolshevism. On the
contrary, they found in its arsenal all they needed for the explanation
of its fate. They drew this conclusion: certainly Stalinism ’grew out ’
of Bolshevism, not logically, however, but dialectically; not as a
revolutionary affirmation but as a Thermidorian negation. It is by no
means the same.

Bolshevism’s Basic Prognosis

The Bolsheviks, however, did not have to wait for the Moscow trials to
explain the reasons for the disintegration of the governing party of the
USSR. Long ago they foresaw and spoke of the theoretical possibility of
this development. Let us remember the prognosis of the Bolsheviks, not
only on the eve of the October Revolution but years before. The specific
alignment of forces in the national and international field can enable
the proletariat to seize power first in a backward country such as
Russia. But the same alignment of forces proves beforehand that without
a more or less rapid victory of the proletariat in the advanced
countries the worker’s government in Russia will not survive. Left to
itself the Soviet regime must either fall or degenerate. More exactly;
it will first degenerate and then fall. I myself have written about this
more than once, beginning in 1905. In my History of the Russian
Revolution (cf, ’Appendix’ to the last volume: ’Socialism in one
country’) are collected all the statements on the question made by the
Bolshevik leaders from 1917 until 1923. They all amount to the
following: without a revolution in the West, Bolshevism will be
liquidated either by internal counter-revolution or by external
intervention, or by a combination of both. Lenin stressed again and
again that the bureaucratisation of the Soviet regime was not a
technical question, but the potential beginning of the degeneration of
the worker’s state.

At the eleventh party congress in March, 1922, Lenin spoke of the
support offered to Soviet Russia at the time of the NEP by certain
bourgeois politicians, particularly the liberal professor Ustrialov. ’I
am for the support of the Soviet power in Russia’ said Ustrialov,
although he was a Cadet, a bourgeois, a supporter of intervention -
’because it has taken the road that will lead it back to an ordinary
bourgeois state’. Lenin prefers the cynical voice of the enemy to
’sugary communistic nonsense’. Soberly and harshly he warns the party of
danger: ’We must say frankly that the things Ustrialov speaks about are
possible. History knows all sorts of metamorphoses. Relying on firmness
of convictions, loyalty and other splendid moral qualities is anything
but a serious attitude in politics. A few people may be endowed with
splendid moral qualities, but historical issues are decided by vast
masses, which, if the few don’t suit them, may at times, treat them none
too politely.’ In a word, the party is not the only factor of
development and on a larger historical scale is not the decisive one.

’One nation conquers another’ continued Lenin at the same congress, the
last in which he participated... ’this is simple and intelligible to
all. But what happens to the culture of these nations? Here things are
not so simple. If the conquering nation is more cultured than the
vanquished nation, the former imposes its culture on the latter, but if
the opposite is the case, the vanquished nation imposes its culture on
the conqueror. Has not something like this happened in the capital of
the RSFSR? Have the 4700 Communists (nearly a whole army division, and
all of them the very best) come under the influence of an alien
culture?’. This was said in 1922, and not for the first time. History is
not made by a few people, even ’the best’; and not only that: these
’best’ can degenerate in the spirit of an alien, that is, a bourgeois
culture. Not only can the Soviet state abandon the way of socialism, but
the Bolshevik party can, under unfavourable historic conditions, lose
its Bolshevism.

From the clear understanding of this danger issued the Left Opposition,
definitely formed in 1923. Recording day by day the symptoms of
degeneration, it tried to oppose to the growing Thermidor the conscious
will of the proletarian vanguard. However, this subjective factor proved
to be insufficient. The ’gigantic masses’ which, according to Lenin,
decide the outcome of the struggle, become tired of internal privations
and of waiting too long for the world revolution. The mood of the masses
declined. The bureaucracy won the upper hand. It cowed the revolutionary
vanguard, trampled upon Marxism, prostituted the Bolshevik party.
Stalinism conquered. In the form of the Left Opposition, Bolshevism
broke with the Soviet bureaucracy and its Comintern. This was the real
course of development.

To be sure, in a formal sense Stalinism did issue from Bolshevism. Even
today the Moscow bureaucracy continues to call itself the Bolshevik
party. It is simply using the old label of Bolshevism the better to fool
the masses. So much the more pitiful are those theoreticians who take
the shell for the kernel and appearance for reality. In the
identification of Bolshevism and Stalinism they render the best possible
service to the Thermidorians and precisely thereby play a clearly
reactionary role.

In view of the elimination of all other parties from the political field
the antagonistic interests and tendencies of the various strata of the
population, to a greater of less degree, had to find their expression in
the governing party, To the extent that the political centre of gravity
has shifted form the proletarian vanguard to the bureaucracy, the party
has changed its social structure as well as its ideology. Owing to the
tempestuous course of development, it has suffered in the last 15 years
a far more radical degeneration than did the social democracy in half a
century. The present purge draws between Bolshevism and Stalinism not
simply a bloody line but a whole river of blood. The annihilation of all
the older generation of Bolsheviks, an important part of the middle
generation which participated in the civil war, and that part of the
youth that took up most seriously the Bolshevik traditions, shows not
only a political but a thoroughly physical incompatibility between
Bolshevism and Stalinism. How can this not be seen?

Stalinism and "state socialism"

The anarchists, for their part, try to see in Stalinism the organic
product, not only of Bolshevism and Marxism but of ’state socialism’ in
general. They are willing to replace Bakunin’s patriarchal ’federation
of free communes’ by the modern federation of free Soviets. But, as
formerly, they are against centralised state power. Indeed, one branch
of ’state’ Marxism, social democracy, after coming to power became an
open agent of capitalism. The other gave birth to a new privileged
caste. It is obvious that the source of evil lies in the state. From a
wide historical viewpoint, there is a grain of truth in this reasoning.
The state as an apparatus of coercion is an undoubted source of
political and moral infection. This also applies, as experience has
shown, to the workers’ state. Consequently it can be said that Stalinism
is a product of a condition of society in which society was still unable
to tear itself out of the strait-jacket of the state. But this position,
contributing nothing to the elevation of Bolshevism and Marxism,
characterises only the general level of mankind, and above all - the
relation of forces between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. Having
agreed with the anarchists that the state, even the workers’ state, is
the offspring of class barbarism and that real human history will begin
with the abolition of the state, we have still before us in full force
the question: what ways and methods will lead, ultimately, to the
abolition of the state? Recent experience bears witness that they are
anyway not the methods of anarchism.

The leaders of the Spanish Federation of Labour (CNT), the only
important anarchist organisation in the world, became, in the critical
hour, bourgeois ministers. They explained their open betrayal of the
theory of anarchism by the pressure of ’exceptional circumstances’. But
did not the leaders of German social democracy produce, in their time,
the same excuse? Naturally, civil war is not peaceful and ordinary but
an ’exceptional circumstance’. Every serious revolutionary organisation,
however, prepares precisely for ’exceptional circumstances’. The
experience of Spain has shown once again that the state can be ’denied’
in booklets published in ’normal circumstances’ by permission of the
bourgeois state, but the conditions of revolution leave no room for the
denial of the state: they demand, on the contrary, the conquest of the
state. We have not the slightest intention of blaming the anarchists for
not having liquidated the state with the mere stroke of a pen. A
revolutionary party , even having seized power (of which the anarchist
leaders were incapable in spite of the heroism of the anarchist
workers), is still by no means the sovereign ruler of society. But all
the more severely do we blame the anarchist theory, which seemed to be
wholly suitable for times of peace, but which had to be dropped rapidly
as soon as the ’exceptional circumstances’ of the... revolution had
begun. In the old days there were certain generals - and probably are
now - who considered that the most harmful thing for an army was war.
Little better are those revolutionaries who complain that revolution
destroys their doctrine.

Marxists are wholly in agreement with the anarchists in regard to the
final goal: the liquidation of the state. Marxists are ’state-ist’ only
to the extent that one cannot achieve the liquidation of the state
simply by ignoring it. The experience of Stalinism does not refute the
teaching of Marxism but confirms it by inversion. The revolutionary
doctrine which teaches the proletariat to orient itself correctly in
situations and to profit actively by them, contains of course no
automatic guarantee of victory. But victory is possible only through the
application of this doctrine. Moreover, the victory must not be though
of as a single event. It must be considered in the perspective of an
historical epoch. The workers’ state - on a lower economic basis and
surrounded by imperialism - was transformed into the gendarmerie of
Stalinism. But genuine Bolshevism launched a life and death struggle
against the gendarmerie. To maintain itself Stalinism is now forced to
conduct a direct civil war against Bolshevism under the name of
’Trotskyism’, not only in the USSR but also in Spain. The old Bolshevik
party is dead but Bolshevism is raising its head everywhere.

To deduce Stalinism form Bolshevism or from Marxism is the same as to
deduce, in a larger sense, counter-revolution from revolution.
Liberal-conservative and later reformist thinking has always been
characterised by this cliche. Due to the class structure of society,
revolutions have always produced counter-revolutions. Does not this
indicate, asks the logician, that there is some inner flaw in the
revolutionary method? However, neither the liberals nor reformists have
succeeded, as yet, in inventing a more ’economical’ method. But if it is
not easy to rationalise the living historic process, it is not at all
difficult to give a rational interpretation of the alternation of its
waves, and thus by pure logic to deduce Stalinism from ’state
socialism’, fascism from Marxism, reaction from revolution, in a word,
the antithesis from the thesis. In this domain as in many others
anarchist thought is the prisoner of liberal rationalism. Real
revolutionary thinking is not possible without dialectics.

The Political ’Sins’ of Bolshevism as the Source of Stalinism

The arguments of the rationalists assume at times, at least in their
outer form, a more concrete character. They do not deduce Stalinism from
Bolshevism as a whole but from its political sins. the Bolsheviks -
according to Gorter, Pannekoek, certain German ’Spartacists’ and others
- replaced the dictatorship of the proletariat with the dictatorship of
the party; Stalin replaced the dictatorship of the party with the
dictatorship of the bureaucracy, the Bolsheviks destroyed all parties
except their own; Stalin strangled the Bolshevik party in the interests
of a Bonapartist clique. The Bolsheviks compromised with the
bourgeoisie; Stalin became its ally and support. The Bolsheviks
recognised the necessity of participation in the old trade unions and in
the bourgeois parliament; Stalin made friends with the trade union
bureaucracy and bourgeois democracy. One can make such comparisons at
will. For all their apparent effectiveness they are entirely empty.

The proletariat can take power only through its vanguard. In itself the
necessity for state power arises from the insufficient cultural level of
the masses and their heterogeneity. In the revolutionary vanguard,
organised in a party, is crystallised the aspiration of the masses to
obtain their freedom. Without the confidence of the class in the
vanguard, without support of the vanguard by the class, there can be no
talk of the conquest of power. In this sense the proletarian revolution
and dictatorship are the work of the whole class, but only under the
leadership of the vanguard. The Soviets are the only organised form of
the tie between the vanguard and the class. A revolutionary content can
be given this form only by the party. This is proved by the positive
experience of the October Revolution and by the negative experience of
other countries (Germany, Austria, finally, Spain). No one has either
shown in practice or tried to explain articulately on paper how the
proletariat can seize power without the political leadership of a party
that knows what it wants. the fact that this party subordinates the
Soviets politically to its leaders has, in itself, abolished the Soviet
system no more than the domination of the conservative majority has
abolished the British parliamentary system.

As far as the prohibition of other Soviet parties is concerned, it did
not flow from any ’theory’ of Bolshevism but was a measure of defence of
the dictatorship on a backward and devastated country, surrounded by
enemies on all sides. For the Bolsheviks it was clear from the beginning
that this measure, later completed by the prohibition of factions inside
the governing party itself, signalised a tremendous danger. However, the
root of the danger lay not in the doctrine or the tactics but in the
material weakness of the dictatorship, ion the difficulties of its
internal and international situation. If the revolution had triumphed,
even if only in Germany, the need of prohibiting the other Soviet
parties would have immediately fallen away. It is absolutely
indisputable that the domination of a single party served as the
juridical point of departure for the Stalinist totalitarian regime. the
reason for this development lies neither in Bolshevism nor in the
prohibition of other parties as a temporary war measure, but in the
number of defeats of the proletariat in Europe and Asia.

The same applies to the struggle with anarchism. In the heroic epoch of
the revolution the Bolsheviks went hand in hand with genuinely
revolutionary anarchists. Many of them were drawn into the ranks of the
party. The author of these lines discussed with Lenin more then once the
possibility of allotting the anarchists certain territories where, with
the consent of the local population, they would carry out their
stateless experiment. But civil war, blockade and hunger left no room
for such plans. The Kronstadt insurrection? But the revolutionary
government could naturally not ’present’ to the insurrectionary sailors
the fortress which protected the capital only because the reactionary
peasant-soldier rebellion was joined by a few doubtful anarchists. The
concrete historical analysis of the events leaves not the slightest room
for legends, built up on ignorance and sentimentality, concerning
Kronstadt, Makhno and other episodes of the revolution.

There remains only the fact that the Bolsheviks from the beginning
applied not only conviction but also compulsion, often to a most severe
degree. It is also indisputable that later the bureaucracy which grew
out of the revolution monopolised the system of compulsions in its own
hands. Every stage of development, even such catastrophic stages as
revolution and counter-revolution, flows from the preceding stage, is
rooted in it and carries over some of its features. Liberals, including
the Webbs, have always maintained that the Bolshevik dictatorship
represented only a new edition of Tsarism. they close their eyes to such
’details’ as the abolition of the monarchy and the nobility, the handing
over of the land to the peasants, the expropriation of capital, the
introduction of the planned economy, atheist education, and so on. In
exactly the same way liberal- anarchist thought closes its eyes to the
fact that the Bolshevik revolution, with all its repressions, meant an
upheaval of social relations in the interests of the masses, whereas
Stalin’s Thermidorian upheaval accompanies the reconstruction of Soviet
society in the interest of a privileged minority. It is clear that in
the identification of Stalinism with Bolshevism there is not a trace of
socialist criteria.

Questions of Theory

One of the most outstanding features of Bolshevism has been its severe,
exacting, even quarrelsome attitude towards the question of doctrine.
The 26 volumes of Lenin’s works will remain forever a model of the
highest theoretical conscientiousness. Without this fundamental quality
Bolshevism would never have fulfilled its historic role. In this regard
Stalinism, coarse, ignorant and thoroughly empirical, is its complete
opposite.

The Opposition declared more than 10 years ago in its programme: ’Since
Lenin’s death a whole set of new theories has been created, whose only
purpose is to justify the Stalin group’s sliding off the path of the
international proletarian revolution.’ Only a few days ago an American
writer, Liston M Oak, who has participated in the Spanish revolution,
wrote: ’The Stalinists are in fact today the foremost revisionists of
Marx and Lenin - Bernstein did not dare go half as far as Stalin in
revising Marx.’ This is absolutely true. One must add only that
Bernstein actually felt certain theoretical needs: he tried
conscientiously to establish a correspondence between the reformist
practices of social democracy and its programme. The Stalinist
bureaucracy, however, not only had nothing in common with Marxism but is
in general foreign to any doctrine or system whatsoever. Its ’ideology’
is thoroughly permeated with police subjectivism, its practice is the
empiricism of crude violence. In keeping with its essential interests
the caste of usurpers is hostile to any theory: it can give an account
of its social role neither to itself nor to anyone else. Stalin revises
Marx and Lenin not with the theoreticians pen but with the heel of the
GPU.

Questions of Morals

Complaints of the ’immorality’ of Bolshevism come particularly from
those boastful nonentities whose cheap masks were torn away by
Bolshevism. In petit-bourgeois, intellectual, democratic, ’socialist’,
literary, parliamentary and other circles, conventional values prevail,
or a conventional language to cover their lack of values. This large and
motley society for mutual protection - ’live and let live’ - cannot bear
the touch of the Marxist lancet on its sensitive skin. The
theoreticians, writers and moralists, hesitating between different
camps, thought and continue to think that the Bolsheviks maliciously
exaggerate differences, are incapable of ’loyal’ collaboration and by
their ’intrigues’ disrupt the unity of the workers’ movement. Moreover,
the sensitive and touchy centrist has always thought that the Bolsheviks
were ’calumniating’ him - simply because they carried through to the end
for him his half-developed thoughts : he himself was never able to. But
the fact remains that only that precious quality, an uncompromising
attitude towards all quibbling and evasion, can educate a revolutionary
party which will not be taken unawares by ’exceptional circumstances’.

The moral qualities of every party flow, in the last analysis, from the
historical interests that it represents. the moral qualities of
Bolshevism self-renunciation, disinterestedness, audacity and contempt
for every kind of tinsel and falsehood - the highest qualities of human
nature! - flow from revolutionary intransigence in the service of the
oppressed. The Stalinist bureaucracy imitates also in this domain the
words and gestures of Bolshevism. But when ’intransigence’ and
’flexibility’ are applied by a police apparatus in the service of a
privileged minority they become a force of demoralisation and
gangsterism. One can feel only contempt for these gentlemen who identify
the revolutionary heroism of the Bolsheviks with the bureaucratic
cynicism of the Thermidorians.

Even now, in spite of the dramatic events in the recent period, the
average philistine prefers to believe that the struggle between
Bolshevism (’Trotskyism’) and Stalinism concerns a clash of personal
ambitions, or, at best, a conflict between two ’shades ’ of Bolshevism.
The crudest expression of this opinion is given by Norman Thomas, leader
of the American Socialist Party: ’There is little reason to believe’. he
writes (Socialist review, September 1937, p6), ’that if Trotsky had won
(!) instead of Stalin, there would be an end of intrigue, plots, and a
reign of fear in Russia’. And this man considers himself... a Marxist.
One would have the same right to say: ’There is little reason to believe
that if instead of Pius XI, the Holy See were occupied by Norman I, the
Catholic Church would have been transformed into a bulwark of
socialism’. Thomas fails to understand that it is not a question of
antagonism between Stalin and Trotsky, but of an antagonism between the
bureaucracy and the proletariat. To be sure, the governing stratum of
the USSR is forced even now to adapt itself to the still not wholly
liquidated heritage of revolution, while preparing at the same time
through direct civil war (bloody ’purge’ - mass annihilation of the
discontented) a change of the social regime. But in Spain the Stalinist
clique is already acting openly as a bulwark of the bourgeois order
against socialism. The struggle against the Bonapartist bureaucracy is
turning before our eyes into class struggle: two worlds, two programmes,
two moralities. If Thomas thinks that the victory of the socialist
proletariat over the infamous caste of oppressors would not politically
and morally regenerate the Soviet regime, he proves only that for all
his reservations, shufflings and pious sighs he is far nearer to the
Stalinist bureaucracy than to the workers. Like other exposers of
Bolshevik ’immorality’, Thomas has simply not grown to the level of
revolutionary morality.

The Traditions of Bolshevism and the Fourth International

The ’lefts’ who tried to skip Bolshevism in their return to Marxism
generally confined themselves to isolated panaceas: boycott of
parliament, creation of ’genuine’ Soviets. All this could still seem
extremely profound in the heat of the first days after the war. But now,
in the light of most recent experience, such ’infantile diseases’ have
no longer even the interest of a curiosity. The Dutchmen Gorter and
Pannekoek, the German ’Spartakists’, the Italian Bordigists, showed
their independence from Bolshevism only by artificially inflating one of
its features and opposing it to the rest. But nothing has remained
either in practice or in theory of these ’left’ tendencies: an indirect
but important proof that Bolshevism is the only possible form of Marxism
for this epoch.

The Bolshevik party has shown in action a combination of the highest
revolutionary audacity and political realism. It established for the
first time the correspondence between the vanguard and the class which
alone is capable of securing victory. It has p roved by experience that
the alliance between the proletariat and the oppressed masses of the
rural and urban petit bourgeoisie is possible only through the political
overthrow of the traditional petit-bourgeois parties. The Bolshevik
party has shown the entire world how to carry out armed insurrection and
the seizure of power. Those who propose the abstraction of the Soviets
from the party dictatorship should understand that only thanks to the
party dictatorship were the Soviets able to lift themselves out of the
mud of reformism and attain the state form of the proletariat. The
Bolshevik party achieved in the civil war the correct combination of
military art and Marxist politics. Even if the Stalinist bureaucracy
should succeed in destroying the economic foundations of the new
society, the experience of planned economy under the leadership of the
Bolshevik party will have entered history for all time as one of the
greatest teachings of mankind. This can be ignored only by sectarians
who, offended by the bruises they have received, turn their backs on the
process of history.

But his is not all. The Bolshevik party was able to carry on its
magnificent ’practical’ work only because it illuminated all its steps
with theory. Bolshevism did not create this theory: it was furnished by
Marxism. But Marxism is a theory of movement, not of stagnation. Only
events on such a tremendous historical scale could enrich the theory
itself. Bolshevism brought an invaluable contribution to Marxism in its
analysis of the imperialist epoch as an epoch of wars and revolutions;
of bourgeois democracy in the era of decaying capitalism; of the
correlation between the general strike and the insurrection; of the role
of the party, Soviets and trade unions in the period of proletarian
revolution; in its theory of the Soviet state, of the economy of
transition, of fascism and Bonapartism in the epoch of capitalist
decline; finally in its analysis of the degeneration of the Bolshevik
party itself and of the Soviet state. Let any other tendency be named
that has added anything essential to the conclusions and generalisations
of Bolshevism. Theoretically and politically Vandervilde, De Brouckere,
Hilferding, Otto Bauer, Leon Blum, Zyromski, not to mention Major Attlee
and Norman Thomas, live on the tattered leftovers of the past. The
degeneration of the Comintern is most crudely expressed by the fact that
it has dropped to the theoretical level of the Second International. All
the varieties of intermediary groups (Independent Labour Party of Great
Britain, POUM and their like) adapt every week new haphazard fragments
of Marx and Lenin to their current needs. Workers can learn nothing from
these people.

Only the founders of the Fourth International. who have made their own
the whole tradition of Marx and Lenin, take a serious attitude towards
theory. Philistines may jeer that 20 years after the October victory the
revolutionaries are again thrown back to modest propagandist
preparation. The big capitalists are, in this question as in many
others, far more penetrating than the petit bourgeois who imagine
themselves ’socialists’ or ’communists’. It is no accident that the
subject of the Fourth International does not leave the columns of the
world press. The burning historical need for revolutionary leadership
promises to the Fourth International an exceptionally rapid tempo of
growth. The greatest guarantee of its further success lies in the fact
that it has not arisen away from the great historical road, but has
organically grown out of Bolshevism.

Stalinism and Bolshevism online version: Reprinted in the magazine
Living Marxism, No. 18, April 1990.